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A very quick price out of the above components totaled $875 at reasonable online retailer NewEgg, give or take a few choices, but I typically went for the cheapest option across the board and didn't include shipping or tax. I'm sure that more frugal, more experience component shoppers could do better.

Thing is if you wait about a week or 2, intel is about to release their new chips (some people already reporting them for sale), so you could make an even better system. And it would be more than worth it to spend the extra $50 and get another 2 gigs of ram, and since you are spending almost the same amount for XP, which won't give you DX10 on a DX10 capable system, why not just go ahead and get Vista. A rig like that is more than powerful enough to run Vista and not give you the "problems" most people are having with Vista due to them trying to put it on an older system.

and since you are spending almost the same amount for XP, which won't give you DX10 on a DX10 capable system, why not just go ahead and get Vista. A rig like that is more than powerful enough to run Vista and not give you the "problems" most people are having with Vista due to them trying to put it on an older system.

The recommendation for XP might be because the DX9 path seems to perform a bit better than DX10 at identical settings. Even with an E6750/8800GT it still might be a little rough at 1200+ res and high/medium settings, and the few extra FPS with DX9 could help. I know it's possible to run DX9 in Vista, but they probably don't expect that to be obvious to most people and even then I wouldn't be surprised if DX9 in XP still performs a little better.

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Yes it does. All the reviews show Crysis having much better FPS in XP over Vista, but since the topic is $$, and Crysis isn't the only game out there (or even the best :()
I would go for long term usage without future upgrade than an extra 5 FPS in the one game Crysis. Would play most other games like BF2 and COD4 really well.
Just me though.

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Probably because Nvidia and Crytek are best buds, and that is the cheaper version of the 680i chipset.
And this is not my list, it is from Crytek.
I would personally go with a p35 chipset, as they have had a lot less problems, unless you are looking to go SLI/Crossfire for sure.

By the way, the past two days I have been reading about lots of problems with the 780i chipset. Maybe just bugs since it is so new, but we have been talking about it here in the forums. In one article they were comparing it to how buggy the present generation of nforce boards are.
They have sold lots of 650i boards, just make sure you do your homework.

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I looked through that list already. I don't have any faith in Gigabyte boards since I've had nothing but memory issues with my last one. ECS has me very worried and concerned, since they began as mainly a cheapo budget board (had two boards, both are dead). Also they manufactured parts for SOYO at one point and SOYO boards don't last either. I'm not sure I'm ready to toss anything into MSI since I've read some detailed reviews that have been concerned about reliability of some of their lower end stock (sub $100).

The eVGA board I've picked out is actually $95 right now and by the time I purchase it, it'll be probably $80 or so.